Dear Uproar, I can’t decide what prom dress to wear. Do you have any recommendations?

~Dress For Success

First of all, I must address how awfully timed this question is. Prom is on May 4th, much too soon to accurately go through the process of deciding what dress to wear and how your hair should look. You should have been considering this at the beginning of freshman year, and your exact plans should have been finalized by September. But fret not! I am not here to shame you, but rather to help you, for you seem desperately in need of it.

For your dress, you want something that no one else is going to wear. You want to stand out. You want to excel in your craft. Your costume–I mean dress–needs to be so elaborate and jaw-dropping that everyone else in the room looks like an old, haggardly maid. For this kind of look, I would reference the style icons Queen Elizabeth I, the planet Saturn, and Cthulhu the Great Dreamer.

Your makeup, like your dress, also needs to go above and beyond. If you feel safe wearing your makeup, you are doing it absolutely wrongly. You want to feel like if you inhale one more time, you will go unconscious because of all the chemicals on your face. You need to apply so much makeup that Mike Myers as the Cat in the Hat looks human compared to you. Contour mercilessly. Apply mascara until your eyes look like black holes. Wing your eyeliner all the way to the back of your head and then back around again. Excess does not exist. Go wild.

Your shoes will be clown shoes. This is not advice — this is a promise. You have no other choice.

And finally, the finishing touch–the hair. This is the only thing that you should not stress over until you cough blood. You can get the same look as you would with hours of maintenance by simply placing a poodle on your head. He won’t fall off, don’t you worry. Just sprinkle bits of bacon in your hair so he has something to stay up there for.

Prom is a stressful time. But the purpose of the Big Night is not to have a good time; rather, it is a social war against your peers. If you have planned correctly, you will arrive to the dance floor in all your glory and all who behold you will weep and crumble to their knees, begging for mercy. The crown is up for grabs. Will you sieze it?